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Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

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Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly are you trying to have a discussion with me about? Edit: it’s wrong of me for uh, responding?

You're harassing someone for basically saying "your mention of 'unfettered free speech' is off topic". While acting like the person that said that is the one that brought up 'unfettered free speech'. You are wrong to do that.

What Are You Talking About

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having rules on a private website is against the concept of free speech? How much of your own money are you willing to spend on hosting and serving an unlimited amount of user-uploaded hentai tentacle porn on your privately-owned domain? If the answer is anything less than “infinite money”, you’re anti-free-speech.

> If the answer is anything less than “infinite money”, you’re anti-free-speech. Pointing this out is not the most popular thing on HN, but that doesn't make it less true. I made a similar case a week or two ago in response to someone who did a Show HN on their new "free speech" platform. I essentially challenged the creator to advocate for his new platform by supporting the speech rights of child abusers to promote…

Its interesting that you mention this infinite money problem. Have you ever noticed that the second a fully free speech site opens it is almost instantly crippled with CP? Do you really think that is just happening naaturally? How can something universally loathed also be so prolific that it needs to constanly infect venues to propogate? Its almost like its a tactic to suppress free speech but im just a nut.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#83

Stopped reading and posting on SA when they started requiring members to pay to join. That was bullshit that went against the whole ethos. Upon reflection, SA was vastly overrated. It started some wildly popular memes, because at the time it was one of the few places for memes. But that's about it. Kyanka himself has had numerous domestic violence police reports filed against him. He is not someone to be celebrated.

> Kyanka himself has had numerous domestic violence police reports filed against him.

Was he convicted? It’s very easy to file a domestic violence police report, and that does not remotely mean that the accused was guilty.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#84
post #7
post #2

Advocates for unfettered "free speech" always seem to gloss over the fact that a lot of that shit is not healthy. I'm not trying to argue that such speech should be censored, but it's certainly nothing to be celebrated.

Lowtax wasn't an advocate for unfettered free speech lol. He encouraged and enabled arbitrary and capricious punishment for pretty much anything the forum moderators didn't personally like.

Yep, in fact the SA Forums entire business model was "arbitrary and capriciously" banning people so they would re-register and pay the 10bux. They had rules, but they were fungible enough so that intelligent and hilarious people wanted to see what they could get away with. Racism was strictly against the rules, but some people could post the N-word "because they are funny" (and friends with the admins).

Around 2007 or so, SA stopped being an "internet comedy forum" and started being "serious internet business" and that's when I lost interest.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly, but Something Awfully famously censored certain types of porn-related posts leading to 4chan so unfettered free speech isn't something SA has ever really been known for.

> Something Awfully famously censored certain types of porn-related posts leading to 4chan According to people who weren't there at the time, yes. (That mostly happened several years later on SA.)

No that basically all happend around the same time. If you look at the SAclopedia entries for ADTRW, they're all from early 2004 and you see things like "The fact that Lowtax hates makes it the forum whipping-boy."

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#86

What’s been interesting through the years on the forums that I’ve found to be strange is that as the Internet social media landscape became “free” services that have terrible, low effort, low quality content and users as a rule, SA’s model of having users pay to post is becoming more of a better model to help avoid the poor incentives of most companies to demand more of users’ attention. The posting quality for users…

I’d rather have sites more like SA than more Reddits, Twitter, FB, etc. that is and it’s a bit of a pity the business model never really panned out at scale. It doesn't have to pan out at scale, though. That's the thing that I've always loved about it. By charging directly you can stay smaller. For example, suppose you're charging $5/month. You can achieve $100K revenue with 1.7K paying users. You don't have do it "a…

I think that's the market Substack is trying to tap into, although not quite the same obviously.

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#87

Stopped reading and posting on SA when they started requiring members to pay to join. That was bullshit that went against the whole ethos. Upon reflection, SA was vastly overrated. It started some wildly popular memes, because at the time it was one of the few places for memes. But that's about it. Kyanka himself has had numerous domestic violence police reports filed against him. He is not someone to be celebrated.

[deleted]

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#89

Stopped reading and posting on SA when they started requiring members to pay to join. That was bullshit that went against the whole ethos. Upon reflection, SA was vastly overrated. It started some wildly popular memes, because at the time it was one of the few places for memes. But that's about it. Kyanka himself has had numerous domestic violence police reports filed against him. He is not someone to be celebrated.

> Kyanka himself has had numerous domestic violence police reports filed against him. Was he convicted? It’s very easy to file a domestic violence police report, and that does not remotely mean that the accused was guilty.

One of his exes posted on SA [1]:

> In the divorce ruling the judge found that Rich had willfully spent down the martial fund, confirmed his treatment of me was Domestic Violence and put together a plan to pay for the attorney fees etc.

[1] https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&th...

Re: Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, founder of Something Awful, has died

#90
post #26

The Reddit thread has a lot more details https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/qro1ir/somethin...

I want to hear the Moms' side of the story. An abusive man can wield power through domestic violence but an abusive women is far more insidious. An abusive woman does not have the strength to employ violence so she uses other means inflict damage. Manipulation, legal tactics, lies and other techniques are used. The key here is that most of these techniques are subtle. I don't know what happened here, but I can almost…

What concerned me in that post was this bit:

> His other ex and I got to tell our children that their father died without saying goodbye to them, or that he loved them

Assuming the children aren't 14+, this is where a white lie is in their best interests. Telling them this, true as it may be, will only traumatise them further than they may already be.

I know it can be very hard though when you've had a traumatic relationship with your ex.

Source - based on all my research, and discussions with child psychologists, I tell my younger kids, when they need to hear it, that their Mom still loves them, she's just working through some stuff.

The reality is that her conduct indicates no love whatsoever, merely an interest in using our kids to further her narcissistic goals ("Winning" against me, even though it's not a contest, and garnering sympathy from her well meaning but somewhat naïve religious community).

And she definitely isn't working through any of her stuff. She's only allowed supervised access, and hasn't used it once in the nearly 4 years I've had sole custody - because she "did nothing wrong", and using it would imply she had.

But, my younger kids still need to hear that she loves them, from time to time. I admit that I dislike telling them she does, but it's not about me, it's about them.

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